Yup. They just want a single day to enjoy the beach and feel safe and not be judged.

The internet loses its damned mind

A lot of people seem to think that you can shame people out of obesity, which is nonsense. We live in a country where processed foods are cheap and easy when people barely have enough time to relax, let alone cook. Those processed foods are also designed by everything from scientists specializing in creating new flavors to psychologists to get people to buy them, so they do. We also live in a country where a lot of people are expected to just sit in a chair for eight hours with maybe a couple of short breaks and a lot of them end up doing regular overtime (and that doesn’t count commuting time, when they are also likely sitting).

Of course there’s an obesity epidemic. Why wouldn’t there be? But shaming people for being fat when they don’t have time to cook or the energy to exercise and are forced to spend large portions of their lives sedentary is not the solution. You need to attack the problem at the source, not the terminus.

I hate this line. “Processed foods are cheap and easy.”

Theyre easy, but they’re not cheap.

You can eat much more cheaply if you spend a little bit of time cooking. There’s no fast food meal that beats the price of a simple pasta with some chicken, or rice and beans with bacon, or a beef stew. You can get per serving portions of those for less than $2 USD and all of them use meat. You can get vegetarian dishes down to less than a dollar per portion.

None of those require anything more than a single pot and pan, and a half hour of actual cooking.

Besides, the vast majority of obese people are drinking 1000+ calories a day. Thats not about cheap or easy, water is the cheapest and easiest drink available. They just choose not to.

I say this as someone who drinks coke every single day, and has a BMI under 20. Weight is about portion control. Health is about nutritional balance and exercise.

Now, the lack of education around cooking and nutrition, that’s a problem.

You can eat much more cheaply if you spend a little bit of time cooking.

I addressed this already. Many people barely have enough time to relax and de-stress from their horrible job possibly plus their horrible commute. Expecting everyone to be able to have the psychological fortitude to take the time to cook a meal regularly is asking a lot of a lot of people. Ingredients for cooking may be cheap. Energy for cooking is not a purchasable commodity.

I’m just arguing that it’s not BOTH cheap and easy. It’s only one of those.

Also, don’t cook every meal. I cook 10 portions at a time for my family every time I make dinner and put leftovers in the fridge (or freezer) which reduces the total time to cook per week quite significantly. It barely takes longer to cook 10 portions compared to 2 portions, which drops the per portion cook time down to single digit minutes.

The biggest problem is the lack of planning. If you come home after working and don’t know what you have or what you’re going to make of course it’s going to feel difficult.

So spend 15 minutes on the weekend making a plan for all your meals for the week. Do a single grocery shop for everything you need to reduce trips to the store.

The when you get home on Wednesday, you already know you’re going to cook up some grilled cheese with soup (that’s in your freezer from last week when you made 5 portions) and you can pull it together while you watch an episode of your favorite tv show on the tablet you prop up on your counter.